Journey

Posted on February 24, 2024 by lesleyjonesberry

I am in the middle of a Short Story Writing course and our topic this week is journeys.  I’m finding it impossible to write a story.  Journeys are so deeply symbolic, so essentially, entrenchedly metaphorical, any creative capacity I have freezes in response. It doesn’t help that I’ve just read Erling Kagge’s book ‘Walking’, which contains gems like this:

In Sanskrit, the past tense is designated as the word gata, ‘that which we have walked’ while the future is anāgata ‘that which we have not yet walked’. 

This stops me in my tracks – ha! I reach instinctively into the same imagery, the same vocabulary of spatial language to express an internal experience. I appreciate the paradox at least.

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Epiphany

Posted on January 6, 2024 by lesleyjonesberry

6th January is Epiphany. A major feast day in the Church calendar which has, as soon as we open Wikipedia, a multiplicity of names and associations including Little Christmas and Three Kings Day. It offers, apparently, a choice of things to celebrate. The Visit of the Magi takes the lead in Western Christianity with a wonderfully over-literal suggestion that we need to allow the wise men some travel time, so we spend twelve days waiting for them to arrive at the stable (Or wherever the infant Christ is dwelling: one hopes the census-driven over-crowding has abated and that, picturesque as the stable looks in the paintings, the Holy Family has a more comfortable abode by now).  Eastern Christians, on the other hand, celebrate Christ’s baptism at Epiphany, the start of his adult ministry.  And the wedding at Cana – the first miracle – also gets a look in.  The common theme seems to be the manifestation of the divine to the whole of humanity. Not merely a Jewish messiah, Jesus is shown to be the saviour to all mankind. Epiphany is such a great word and means ‘revelation’ (from the Greek, epiphainein – to reveal). We can all have epiphanies, at any time. Moments of realisation and insight. Epiphany is a blazing, golden word full of positive, energy, immense power. Epiphany sounds like trumpets; it is bright yellow; its mood is overwhelmingly joyous.

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Carpe Diem

Posted on December 30, 2023 by lesleyjonesberry

There is an old Fry and Laurie sketch, Shakespear (sic) Masterclass in which the pedagogic lecturer, Fry, employs fresh-faced actor, Hugh, to work on a passage from Troilus and Cressida:

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-sized monster of ingratitudes:
Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour’d
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done…

Act III Sc iii (or “T&C three three, that’s on page thirty-nine in your New Penguins if you’d like to follow in the tent” as Stephen Fry puts it)

They never progress beyond the first word which is, as they uncover and dissect, spelt in the ordinary way but with a capital letter (“very much upper case”) thus giving us “time in a conventional sense but also an abstract sense”.   The focus intensifies and Hugh is directed to convey all of this in his utterance of the single word:  Time (about 3 mins 30 seconds in to the sketch).    Fry is not impressed by this delivery

What went wrong there, Hugh?

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Indigestion

Posted on December 18, 2023 by lesleyjonesberry

When we are really listened to, we feel better.  We share our problems with a good friend and no decision is made, no action taken, yet our sense of emotional heaviness is so often lightened. 

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I see dead people

Posted on September 24, 2023 by lesleyjonesberry

The ghosts have returned to my dreams.  I am travelling in a car and the driver is revealed to be my dad, so I feel safe although I don’t know where I am going or why;  another time, midway through a complicated series of events, I find the dog in a dusty basement, old and frail but – as ever with dogs – no knowledge of this in herself, so she is happy to see me and keen to chase a ball, and I scoop up her warm, living, silky dog-smell body and take her with me once more.  My waking self rejoices in these reunions.  They generate comfortable feelings of gratitude, not only because of the loved ones they recall but, more importantly, they return my past to me.

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Keeping my head above water

Posted on July 19, 2023 by lesleyjonesberry

Metaphors are ingrained in our language and we cannot communicate fully without them.  The word ‘ingrained’ is itself metaphorical.   The image is of a piece of wood, and the grain which is part of its very fabric, the comforting associations of something which is natural and organic.  I did not write that we are programmed to use metaphor, because that leads our minds towards computing and the mechanistic.  I prefer to conjure, instead, a momentary shimmer of associations of wood grain; reaching out to touch the rough, warm texture, or feel the smooth sandpapered, almost soft-to-the-touch surface with fingertips, with the smell of woodshavings and, perhaps, the soothing brushing of oil into the grain to bring out the inherent beauty.

Without metaphors our language would be a shell (metaphor):  it would be dry (metaphor); it would be barren (metaphor) and nothing would come of it.  We clothe (metaphor) our thoughts in words to create a shape (metaphor) we can use.  We walk around the contours of our mind (metaphor), drawing near to a half-glimpsed (metaphor) thought and pulling back from the half-formed.  We poke and prod at inchoate feelings to mould, sculpt, forge.  To work out how to handle them.  This is how we make sense. 

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Keeping time

Posted on June 24, 2023 by lesleyjonesberry

I left St Paul’s Cathedral at about ten minutes to 8 after a service of Choral Evensong, followed by a mindfulness session and the opportunity to walk the labyrinth installed under the dome:  the Chartres design printed on heavy canvas and large enough for perhaps a dozen people at a time to walk on.  Each of us journeyed slowly to the centre, rapt in our own impressions and feelings.   The dome receded above us towards the heavens; Christ gazed at us, triumphant and golden, above the high altar to the East; the saints and prophets surrounded us with their exhortations to faith.  I hadn’t spoken to anyone for over two hours. There were many people there, sharing the experience, and occasionally we’d had to make necessary social acknowledgements: on arrival and leaving, and negotiating a passing point on the labyrinth route.  These murmurings weren’t really words or speech and the blanket of silence had absorbed them easily, without disturbing the peace  Leaving the building and walking into the gentle summer evening brought a contrast of light and noise – even on this quiet city evening – so, to acclimatise myself back to the outdoor world, I decided to walk a little, along to the next station before I went down to the purgatorial Central Line.

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Because Twitter is too brief

Posted on April 22, 2023 by lesleyjonesberry

David Bradley tweeted this morning, a reply to someone called Lewis Capaldi about a pop video.  This led me to watch the video – and cry – and feel myself a little connected with the modern world.  I don’t often watch pop videos;  I hadn’t even heard of Lewis Capaldi. 

David Bradley however:  he has been a significant part of my world for many years.  There is a word ‘idiolect’ which means the speech habits peculiar to a particular person.  I am going to coin the word ‘idiomundus’:  my own, peculiar, particular world.  I quite like that: it certainly seems to describe this website.

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Life is of a mingled yarn

Posted on March 5, 2023 by lesleyjonesberry

Alls Well that Ends Well, Act IV Scene iii

My best friend is working as a test knitter. This is when experienced craftspeople work through a new pattern to make sure it is accurate and comprehensible, and that the designer’s instructions translate – in the full range of sizes – into the desired garment. She has had to restart the project several times. I’m a competent knitter, albeit not as skilled or informed as she is, and recognise the experience of spotting a mistake, needing to go back and fix it, usually by unravelling and simply doing it again. Also, when working with a new pattern, there’s a process of ‘getting’ it only by doing it. The individual stitch instructions start to cohere with the bigger purpose and sometimes it feels better simply to start all over again, now that knowledge has been absorbed. ‘No, it’s alright, I get it now, I know what I am doing’ says my mum in my memory, who worked in a wool shop in her young adulthood, either side of her war service, and again in later life before retirement.

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Work in Progress

Posted on November 27, 2022 by lesleyjonesberry

Sometimes it seems I am just beginning to learn how to live:  that, until now, I have muddled through by accident. 

As a child I recall grown ups saying “if only I knew then what I know now…”, which I discounted as one of those adult expressions which felt patronising (see also “you can’t put an old head on young shoulders” and of course schooldays / college / childhood being “the best days of your life”).  I felt such sayings bore a whiff of envy about them.  They discounted just how bewildering, powerless and painful childhood, or schooldays, or college can be; they presumed an inability to appreciate the unmerited, glorious gift of youth; and they somehow took away any credit we might have deserved for all the effort we were putting in.   They appeared to come from ‘Gluckschmertz’ – being displeased by an event presumed to be desirable for someone else. 

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